—Jimmy, I’m sorry for saying that. I didn’t mean it. Are you still there, Jimmy? It’s Tess.
—I’m here, Tess. I heard you. Fine, Tess, I’ll go. I will.
• • •
The phone was ringing in the next room. This was six or seven days after Hannah told me he was dead. I was sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment, with a pen in my hand, looking through the help-wanted section in the local newspaper. Brendan was at his job in Detroit. The answering machine clicked on.
—Jimmy, it’s Tess. I got your number from Hannah. You should have rung me by now. Hannah told me you said you were going to ring. Pick up, Jimmy. I know you’re there.
I stood in the doorway and stared at the phone on the floor. Tess was still talking. And my hands were pressed to my ears when I crossed the floor and turned the volume down all the way. Then I left the room and shut the door and sat again before the newspaper. I drew stars around the restaurant jobs that looked promising. I did it like an eager child in possession of a box of new crayons and reams of blank pages, and when I was done I wanted to suss out those restaurants, and so I wrote down their names and addresses, then I shaved and showered, ironed my clothes, and stuck a map of the town in my pocket.
On Main Street people were eating and shopping. On both sides of one restaurant doorway impatiens grew from fake wooden tubs. I forget now if that restaurant was on my list, but I went through the double doors and stood at a host stand in a foyer with high ceilings and windows. Behind the stand, carpeted stairs led to the next floor. Shining brass railings and blond wooden walls and at my feet black and blue tiles. On the specials board the soup of the day was minestrone. A smiling woman with menus appeared. She asked if she could help me. I said I wanted to fill out an application. She fingered her hair around her left ear, reached under the stand, and handed me one. She directed me to a seat at the bar and said I could fill it out there. When I handed back the completed application she asked about my accent. We chatted for ten or fifteen minutes. Her long black fringe was swept back. She resembled a softer version of Chrissie Hynde. And she was wearing this white old-fashioned man’s shirt. One with the stiff point collar. The kind my mother once ironed for my father for Mass. And less than a week after I’d filled out the application, I was bussing tables on lunch and dinner shifts. I had also signed up to take the GED. The community college was mailing its catalogue of winter classes.
The hostess was Sarah. She worked weekends in the restaurant. Two years passed before we really got together. Seven more months before we moved in—though that’s enough of that. On the restaurant application I wrote my name as James. And everyone I came to know from then on called me that and I never once said they should call me any other.
I erased Tess’s message that afternoon before I left the apartment. I never listened to it. And when we did talk, months later, I told Tess the answering machine was broken, and I was sorry for letting time slip away. This I blamed on settling into the new town, the hassles of classes, and the restaurant job. But why didn’t I call? Why didn’t I pick up? And why didn’t I listen? I didn’t want them getting in the way. That’s why. And I was trying very hard not to think about him and those alive and dead connected to him.
• • •
I showered away the flour and I hard-boiled three eggs and spread them on thick slices of sourdough bakery bread with salt and butter. And then I rang Zoë.
—Stop by. Bring decent gin, my dear. I’ll go half. I have lemons and tonic.
—I’ll be right over, my dear.
I took a few hits from the joint. Next I was walking in the shadows of the maples. I said hello to people I often passed on that sidewalk, and they did the same: a sullen-looking student around my age, a tall elderly man who swept the downtown post office, and a hip young couple wearing colorful secondhand clothes.
A U-Haul truck was parked in the elderly woman’s driveway. Two men carried boxes up the ramp. In the middle of the sidewalk stood a thick-chested middle-aged man in a worn t-shirt. Sunglasses were propped on his forehead and his hands were fists in the back pockets of his cargo shorts. He stared up at the men hauling boxes and furniture out the front door. I stepped around him, and I was at the corner, about to cross the street, when I turned back. I stopped a few feet from him. He was still looking at the door. His hairy forearms were golden.
—I haven’t seen the woman on the porch in a while. I live up the street, I said.
—Mom can’t live alone anymore, he said.
He grimaced at the man bringing the scarred headboard of a child’s bed through the door.
—Only monks, nuns, and the unhinged can, I said.
He smirked, turned to me, then back to the door. The withered vines hung limp from the porch rails. The chair and the box were gone. I asked if he was born in the house.
—You bet, but most of the old neighbors are gone, he said. —Dad passed seven years ago at his desk on the back porch, his office desk. He sat at it every day after he retired, but Dad didn’t crunch numbers anymore, he wrote thrillers no one would ever read. Mom and I thought he was crazy. I’m their only kid, and I was saying for years they should sell the house and move south. But Dad, he loved the back porch and the traffic behind the trees. I still don’t get it.
I said the traffic didn’t bother me either, but I didn’t say I’d seen the paperback books and the metal desk. Nor did I say I’d found fifty bucks right where the U-Haul was parked. I politely asked where he now lived.
—Chicago, Evanston, he said. —Mom lives close by. The retirement facility takes good care of her. She doesn’t like it, but we all gotta deal. I’m selling the house. Mom talks about things I know nothing about.
He tapped his forehead with his finger.
—Sorry to hear it, I said.
—So much stuff. My dad’s stuff. I just need to get back home. Look up there.
He pointed to a string of dusty lights strung from hooks along the edge of the porch roof.
—Dad and I put them up one Saturday afternoon after we’d come back from a football game. I screwed in the hooks. He held the ladder. I was just a kid then.
He turned to me.
—You from Germany?
—Ireland, I said.
—Cool, he said, and his eyes went back to the men and the door. —My wife’s folks are from there. We plan on visiting when the kids are older, hike the moors—
—Walk the bogs, maybe—
—What’s the difference?
—The peat, I think.
—Sure, he said.
—Your mom and I never talked, but we waved at each other, I said.
—Mom does not remember anything, like Dad and I never happened, but I just need to get this place cleaned up. I got work back home. Getting a Dumpster in here later tonight. Gotta get rid of all this trash.
• • •
—Walter was telling the truth about the woman on the street, Zoë said, after I told her about meeting the son.
—But one fine day we’ll be like her, remember nothing.
—I’ll try to forget you said that, my dear.
We were sitting on the deck of Zoë’s second-floor apartment. On the small table between us, the gin and tonics with wedges of lemon, two candles burning, and a plate with soft cheese ringed by delicate crackers. I told Zoë I’d spent the afternoon talking to my sisters and brother. Then I told her Kevin Lyons’s younger brother was found dead in London.
—Cocaine nailed him, I added, and I hummed, “Riding out on a rail, feels so fine.”
—That’s terrible, my dear, I’m sorry to hear it.
—My brother and he were very close when they were younger. My brother’s upset.
—I bet he is, but how are you dealing with this?
—I didn’t really know him, my dear. He was younger. And I am gone from there such a
long time.
Daylight was fading. Two fireflies blinked at the edge of the porch. The shadows of the candle flames darted along Zoë’s cheek and neck. She put her glass on the coaster, sighed, and said, —James, I must visit Austin next week.
—And I must visit Kevin Lyons, I said.
—A change of heart.
—I promised my sister, my dear. They love to drag you back into things.
I went to the deck railing and watched the quiet street. The cicadas were drilling inside my head. On the first floor of the house across the way, children sat on a couch before a huge television and ate out of bowls. A mother or a babysitter sat between them. I flicked my cigarette butt into the street and picked up the sweating glass from the railing. I turned to Zoë and leaned against the railing. She was talking about museum exhibitions in Dallas. Her father and her stepmom were flying in there.
—We come and go like fireflies above a field of alien corn, my dear, I said.
—Don’t be dramatic, my dear. What did you expect?
—Oh, the usual, my dear.
—Sounds like what you say to your bartender, my dear.
—Or your hairdresser.
—Do you consider my feelings?
—Indeed, I do, my dear.
—And I consider yours, my dear, but I need to deal with Austin, and you need to deal with this Kevin guy.
—When I felt lonely in Dublin, my dear, I used to think life would be perfect if I were that guy in the film Marty. He lived alone with his mother, in a New York City neighborhood. I can’t think of that actor’s name—
—Ernest Borgnine, my dear. The neighborhood is actually in the Bronx. My dad loves that movie.
—So did mine, and my mother, I said.
—I watched it with my dad many times, Zoë said. —It was set in the neighborhood he lived in as a kid, and so this is your answer, my dear. What next, Jesus? Buddha?
—Gin and tonics, my dear. The others never worked, but I was a teenager then, my dear, who wrote letters home to his mother, even though he didn’t always tell her the truth, which kind of bothered him, but you could sit on the elderly woman’s front porch on Sunday mornings, read the paper, dally over your coffee and orange juice, watch the maples shed in the fall, bud in spring, and spread out the brilliant way they do in summertime.
—That’s the life you loathe, the one you’ve been avoiding—
—Fooling myself, my dear.
—You’ve had all these wonderful experiences, my dear.
—Another name we give to all our mistakes.
—Okay, Mr. Wilde. Look at Walter.
—Maybe he feels he’s free.
—Do you honestly believe that, my dear?
—Not for a second, my dear, and certainly not after meeting that woman. He must be miserable, wherever the fuck he is. Maybe he took to the road again.
—I imagine he feels he’s made a grave mistake.
—I’d like to know why he left, my dear.
—I bet he doesn’t know anymore, my dear.
—True, my dear, but when I first arrived here, I had that job bussing tables in that restaurant, and I also washed dishes a few nights a week for months because dishwashers kept quitting, but I needed the money, so you did what you did to get it.
—Some of this you have already told me, my dear.
—Well, I was eventually promoted to food runner. It was better money. A step up. What I did was take the trays of food from the kitchen to the tables. I got a small percentage of the waiter’s tip. I saw myself as down and out in the American Midwest, but there was this man from Nicaragua who worked in the restaurant—
—I’m not sure where this is going, my dear—
—Neither am I, my dear. Okay, I had insomnia that winter. And when my shifts ended I never wanted to go back to my flat, and so after work I drank whiskey, smoked pot, and played cards with the people who worked in the kitchen. I had a great time with them, although more than a few were dicey characters, but I didn’t really know anyone else then, and my friend Brendan had gone back, and anything is better than tossing and turning in the dark, but when I did eventually walk home buzzed to the gills past the unlit houses I would think how different my life was compared to the past life, and that difference made me feel like I was living this fantastic life. Delusion kept me going, because what I never wanted was to go back home, and so I knew that wherever I ended up, I had to imagine it might fucking work.
—It was fantastic, I think it was, my dear.
—Well, thank you, my dear, but when I was on my way over here this young black man I worked with in the kitchen back then came into my head. He was barely twenty-one. I’d tell him about the books I was reading in my lit class at the community college. I loved that class so much, maybe because it was so new to me then, or the professor was so passionate, but I gave this man Black Boy by Richard Wright, and I gave him books by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. I’d never read any of those writers before then, never even heard of them, and neither had he. And we had these long conversations about those books on cigarette breaks in the basement of the restaurant. Then he got into some serious trouble. He shot someone who fucked with his girlfriend. He didn’t kill him, but he nearly did. Some row on a porch. The gun was there. And the fucking gun goes off. And you could never imagine this young man shooting anyone, I still can’t—but the people at the restaurant went to his trial every day. I didn’t go because of classes, but at the trial he told them his mother cleaned houses for white people. Someone in the restaurant told me that. And the law planted him in the belly of the beast for a very long time.
—I’m not sure what you want me to say, my dear.
—And I don’t know why I’m telling it to you, my dear.
—This young man’s death in London is bothering you, my dear, and you’re going to visit his brother. Also, you’re stoned—
—It’s wearing off, my dear, but the gin has kicked in nicely.
—I wish you had brought me some, my dear. I could use some.
—Next time, I will, my dear, but the young black man used to call me from prison on Sunday nights. He rang at exactly eight minutes after eight. We’d talk again about those writers, and I’d tell him about new books I was reading. I wrote him letters, but I forget what I wrote in them. I suppose small talk about goings-on in the restaurant, and that I hoped he was doing all right, that one day it would be behind him. He could start again. He was young. Shit like that. Then I stopped picking up the phone on Sunday night. I’d stare at it and let it ring. I didn’t want to think about him or about how difficult his life was. I couldn’t manage it. And I started to leave the flat at eight. I’d wander around town for hours and wander along the railway tracks and the river.
—But what became of the man from Nicaragua, my dear?
—We want to think we can imagine people’s lives, but that’s utter nonsense, my dear.
—It might be all we can do, my dear.
—Well, the man from Nicaragua was illegal. In his fifties. He worked at least sixty hours a week in the restaurant, and he worked in the French restaurant on Main Street. I don’t know how many hours he could have possibly put in there. He might have gone back by now or they might have kicked him out. He had a wife and too many kids back home, and he sent his money back to them—
—Like your granduncle once did, my dear—
—Exactly, my dear. It was a Nicaraguan busboy who spoke English told me the man sent the money back—but the man did the work Americans would never do, like scrubbing the greasy kitchen floors on his hands and knees, dragging the greasy kitchen mats that weighed a ton into the alley and hosing them down with boiling water, schlepping out the trash bins, there’s nothing uglier than restaurant trash bins crammed with food at the end of the day, and dumping out the hot grease from the fryers. He finished work long aft
er everyone else did. But at Christmas we dropped names in a hat. And I picked his name, my dear, and I wanted to get him something good. He always smiled at me. I smiled at him, though we could never talk because of the language. And that was one dreadful winter. Hard heaps of snow on the ground for months. And I was broke. I drank cheap beer and went to classes hungover, and I spent most nights with a waitress who dressed funky and lit scented candles around her bed. She bought sex toys and we fucked each other blindfolded to the Piano Concerto Number Five. Then I hooked up with darling Sarah—
—Please, my dear, finish your story about the guy from Nicaragua.
—Well, I bought him a pair of gloves. I wrapped them up nicely in Christmas paper and gave them to him, but when he opened the package, he lifted his hands up to me. Palms out, fingers spread, and he had six fingers on each hand. I’d never noticed that about him, but on each hand, next to his small finger was another bigger finger sticking far out. And when I saw those extra fingers I thought about when a planet skips out of orbit. I was reading about retrograding planets in Astronomy 101, and I thought that was such a natural thing to happen, like here you are but you’re someplace else, and then here you are back in place again.
—And how did the man react, my dear?
—Oh, he smiled and handed the gloves back to me, my dear. I told him I would exchange them for something else, but I never did. I forgot about it. I just didn’t bother. School was back in session. Time went forward.
—Do good, my dear.
—Indeed, my dear. But remember I told you about the houseful of men from El Salvador I lived next door to in Boston?
—The Reagan years, my dear.
—Well, one of those men needed a job for a few weeks, and he asked if I could get him a job on this Irish painting crew I was working on. He needed the cash. He was trying to get to San Antonio. He’d family there.
—More gin, my dear?
—Fine with me, my dear.
I crossed the porch. Zoë poured for both of us. I went back to the railing.
—I said I would do my best to get him the job, my dear. But there was this Irish guy I knew, who like the Salvadoran was illegal, and who’d asked would I try and get him this job on the crew. There was only one going. And I got the job for the Irish guy. I told the guy from El Salvador I tried but they were not taking anyone on. I didn’t even like the Irish guy. He was a racist and a dumbass. And the guy from El Salvador got picked up soon after. Someone else who lived in that house told me that. The guy had tried to get a job in the wrong place and some fucker grassed on him.
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